Several personal financial sites suggest using an envelope system to budget your expenses. The way it works is you get normal postal envelope and assign it a category in your budget. Thus, you could have an envelope for groceries, one for dinning out, and one for clothes. Next, decide how much money you’re going to budget to that category and put that amount in the envelope in CASH. Once the money is gone for that category, it means no more spending on that category.

The idea behind the envelop system is that there’s something psychological about spending cash as opposed to using debit or credit cards. It hurts more to part with cash than it does to swipe a piece of plastic.

Mrs. FLS and I are going to do this with our groceries and dinning out category. These are the places where we tend to lose discipline when using debit cards. We’ll see how it works. Has anybody had success with this system?